Emails show Clinton aides scrambling over book about Bill’s ‘Energizer’
By Laura Italiano
October 23, 2016 | 2:58am | Updated

Hillary Clinton’s top aides sprang into damage-control mode after hearing about a new book detailing her husband Bill’s affair with socialite neighbor Julie Tauber, according to the latest emails published by Wikileaks.

The book was “The First Family In Detail: Secret Service Agents Reveal The Hidden Lives Of Presidents” by Clinton gadfly Edward Klein — and news of its impending publication sent the Clinton inner circle scrambling to set up a conference call.

The aides learned of the book via a Daily Mail article

The chain begins with Bill’s former deputy White House Counsel and Clinton family confidante Cheryl Mills, reaching out to Hillary’s campaign chair, John Podesta, Bill’s former chief of staff.

“Well, they sure managed to get every name into one story,” Podesta responded, apparently after reading the story. “I guess you got to give them credit for that.”

An aide to Bill, Tina Fluornoy, was cc’d on the email, and suggested that the three of them immediately hold a conference call that night, July 25.

“Are you on the call. Just hearing music,” Podesta emails at one point as they set up the call, which is not detailed in the email chain.

The chain’s subject line is, “Who is the ‘Energiser” who has been Clinton’s secret lover?” — a reference to the Daily Mail headline.

Virginia Gov. Terry "The Punk" McAuliffe, a longtime Clinton confidant, helped steer $675,000 to the election campaign of the wife of an FBI official who went on to lead the probe into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email system, according to a report.

The political action committee of McAuliffe, the Clinton loyalist, gave $467,500 to the state Senate campaign of the wife of Andrew McCabe, who is now deputy director of the FBI, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The report states Jill McCabe received an additional $207,788 from the Virginia Democratic Party, which is heavily influenced by McAuliffe.

The money directed by McAuliffe began flowing two months after the FBI investigation into Clinton began in July 2015. Around that time, the candidate’s husband was promoted from running the Washington field office for the FBI to the No. 3 position at the bureau.

Within a year, McCabe was promoted to deputy director, the second-highest position in the bureau.

In a statement to the Journal, the FBI said McCabe “played no role, attended no events, and did not participate in fundraising or support of any kind. Months after the completion of her campaign, then-Associate Deputy Director McCabe was promoted to Deputy, where, in that position, he assumed for the first time, an oversight role in the investigation into Secretary Clinton’s emails.”

The governor’s office claimed the FBI’s McCabe met the governor only once — on March 7, 2015, when McAuliffe persuaded Jill McCabe to run.

The 2015 Virginia state Senate run — her first attempt to gain public office — was unsuccessful as she lost to the incumbent Republican.

McAuliffe “supported Jill McCabe because he believed she would be a good state senator. This is a customary practice for Virginia governors … Any insinuation that his support was tied to anything other than his desire to elect candidates who would help pass his agenda is ridiculous,” a spokesman for the Virginia governor told the Journal.

McAuliffe has been a longtime backer of the Clintons, even serving as Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair in 2008.

WASHINGTON — Hacked emails from the personal account of Hillary Clinton’s top campaign official show her aides considered inserting jokes about her private email server into her speeches at several events — and at least one joke made it into her remarks.

“I love it,” she told a dinner in Iowa on August 14, 2015, noting she had opened an online account with Snapchat, which deletes posts automatically. “Those messages disappear all by themselves.”

The crack scored a laugh from the audience, but the issue was plenty serious. About a month earlier, news broke of an FBI investigation into whether some of the emails that passed through Clinton’s unsecured server contained classified information. Ultimately, the agency criticized Clinton for being reckless with classified information but declined to prosecute her.

But hacked emails of John Podesta, Clinton’s top campaign official, show the Democratic candidate and her team were slow to grasp the seriousness of the controversy, initially believing it might blow over after one weekend. It did not, and became the most recent example of a penchant for secrecy that has fueled questions about Clinton’s trustworthiness, which she has acknowledged has been a political challenge.

The joke was included in hacked emails that WikiLeaks began releasing earlier this month, saying they included years of messages from accounts used by Podesta. Podesta warned that messages may have been altered or edited to inflict political damage, but has not pointed to any specifics.

Almost from the moment The Associated Press on March 3, 2015, called the campaign for comment on its breaking story that Clinton had been running a private server to five months later, campaign aides sought venues on Clinton’s schedule where she could show some humor over the issue, according to the hacked emails.

In a series of emails on March 3, 2015 — the same day The Associated Press called for comment — staffers tossed around the idea of making jokes about the emails at a dinner hosted by EMILY’s List, a libtard political action committee, that evening.

“I wanted to float idea of HRC making a joke about the email situation at the EMILY’s List dinner tonight,” Jennifer Palmieri, director of communications for Clinton’s campaign, wrote at 2:37 p.m., using the candidate’s initials. “What do folks think about that?”

The idea got a mostly favorable response at first. “I don’t think it’s nuts if we can come up with the right thing. But it could also be nuts,” replied campaign spokesman Nick Merrill a couple of minutes later.

“I think it would be good for her to show some humor,” added Kristina Schake, now a deputy communications director. “…More jokes are welcome too.” :rolleyes:

But political consultant Mandy Grunwald nixed the idea after speaking with Jim Margolis, a media adviser to the campaign.

“We don’t know what’s in the emails, so we are nervous about this,” Grunwald wrote to Merrill and Schake at 6:09 p.m. that night. “Might get a big laugh tonight and regret it when content of emails is disclosed.”

Clinton’s campaign aides also considered using Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s 2015 appearance at the Gridiron Dinner, an annual Washington joke-fest involving journalists and politicians, to try and defuse the email issue. McAuliffe is a longtime confidante and fundraiser for Clinton, and was chairman of her unsuccessful 2008 presidential bid.

“Anyway what do we think about using gridiron to puncture the email story a little,” wrote Palmieri, who suggested possible joke topics, including one involving Jeb Bush.

Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook expressed concern, saying reinforcing the idea that Clinton and McAuliffe are close “conjures the 90s stuff” — a reference, to Bill Clinton’s two turbulent terms in office. McAuliffe’s routine at the Gridiron did not ultimately include the discussed email routine.

Five months later, Hillary Clinton’s director of speechwriting, Dan Schwerin, shared a draft of a speech for the annual Iowa political event known as the Wing Ding dinner in an email to colleagues, asking for input.

“I look forward to your feedback. (Also, if anyone has a funny email/server joke, please send it my way.),” he wrote on August 13.

Hillary’s 33,000 emails might not be ‘missing’ after all
By Paul Sperry
October 25, 2016 | 2:33pm | Updated

For months now, we’ve been told that Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 missing emails were permanently erased and destroyed beyond recovery. But newly released FBI notes strongly suggest they still exist in several locations — and they could be recovered, if only someone would impanel a grand jury and seize them.

In a May interview with FBI agents, an executive with the Denver contractor that maintained Clinton’s private server revealed that an underling didn’t bleach-clean all her subpoenaed emails, just ones he stored in a data file he used to transfer the emails from the server to Clinton’s aides, who in turn sorted them for delivery to Congress.

The Platte River Networks executive, whose name was redacted from the interview report, said PRN tech Paul Combetta “created a ‘vehicle’ to transfer email files from the live mailboxes of [Clinton Executive Services Corp.] email accounts [and] then later used BleachBit software to shred the ‘vehicle,’ but the email content still existed in the live email accounts.”

Unless one of Clinton’s aides had the capability to log in to the PRN server as an administrator and remove a mailbox, her archived mailboxes more than likely still reside somewhere in that system. And they may also materialize on an internal “shared drive” that PRN created to control access to the Clinton email accounts among PRN employees. PRN has been under FBI order to preserve all emails and other evidence since the start of its investigation last year.

Clinton’s missing “personal” emails may also be captured on a Google server. According to FBI notes, Combetta “transferred all of the Clinton email content to a personal Google email address he created.” Only the FBI never subpoenaed Google to find out.

The FBI documents also reveal that Hillary’s server was mirrored on a cloud server in Pennsylvania maintained by Datto Inc., a tech firm that performs cloud-to-cloud data protection.

When PRN contracted with Datto, it requested that Hillary’s server be backed up locally and privately. But the techs forgot to order the private node, and they sent the server backup data “remotely to Datto’s secure cloud and not to a local private node.” The FBI never subpoenaed Datto’s server, either.

Then there’s the laptop Combetta loaded with the Clinton email archive and allegedly shipped back to a Clinton aide in Washington, who claims it got “lost” in the mail. Not so fast: The latest FBI document dump includes a series of interviews with an unidentified former “special assistant” to Clinton at the State Department who said the elusive Apple MacBook laptop was actually “shipped to the Clinton Foundation in New York City.”

But in a June follow-up interview, FBI agents inexplicably left it up to this critical witness to “inquire about the shipment” with the foundation’s mailroom manager, who works in Rockefeller Center. The FBI still does not have the laptop in its possession.

It turns out that investigators also know the whereabouts of the original Apple server Clinton used in her first two months in office. Recovering that equipment is critical because it contains a mass of unseen emails from Jan. 21, 2009, to March 18, 2009 — a critical period in Clinton’s tenure at State. Witnesses say the equipment was not discarded, as first believed, but “repurposed” as a “work station” used by staff in Clinton’s Chappaqua residence.

Yet the FBI says it “was unable to obtain the original Apple server for a forensic review.” Instead of seizing it, the agency has taken Clinton’s aides’ and lawyers’ word that the server’s bereft of relevant emails. In fact, the agency confesses on Page 27 of its 47-page investigative case summary that it failed to recover other equipment and data as well: “The FBI’s inability to recover all server equipment and the lack of complete server log data for the relevant time period limited the FBI’s forensic analysis of the server systems. As a result, FBI cyber analysis relied, in large part, on witness statements.”

Congressional investigators say FBI Director James Comey in his year-long “investigation” didn’t even bother to send agents to search Clinton’s homes in Chappaqua or Washington, DC. Nor did he dispatch them to the offices of the Clinton Foundation or Clinton Executive Services Corp. in New York City.

“The Clinton residences and other locations should have been treated like any other criminal investigation — with federal grand jury subpoenas or search warrants issued by judges and served in the middle of the night,” said veteran FBI special agent Michael M. Biasello, who worked criminal cases out of New York and other field offices for 27 years.

“Never — I repeat, never — in my career have I or any FBI agent known to me investigated a criminal case without the use of a federal grand jury, grand jury subpoenas or search warrants,” he said. “It’s disgraceful they weren’t used in this case.”

The most damning evidence against Clinton may never have been actually destroyed. It was simply left untouched by the FBI. :mad: